Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven (13 page)

Spock thought for a moment. “Have you spoken of this to anyone else?” T’Prynn shook her head. Might this be an opportunity to be of service? “I, too, am a musician. Perhaps, if we were to try playing music together, I might help you find that which you have lost.”

She studied him with a frank curiosity. “You would do this for me? Even though we’re little more than passing acquaintances?”

“You are in need, and I may be able to help you. It seems the logical course of action.”

For the briefest moment, her emotional control seemed to waver, as if a bittersweet smile desperately yearned to be seen on her face. Then her composure returned, and she restrained her reaction to a polite bow of her head. “Most generous of you, Spock. I would be honored to accept your help, and to share in your music.”

Though he would have been hard-pressed to explain why, Spock found T’Prynn’s quiet gratitude most agreeable, indeed.

Packing it in
. Doctor Ezekiel Fisher, M.D.—Zeke, to his friends—figured he must have used that phrase hundreds of times over the years, but it had never seemed so apt a description as it did now, as he prepared to vacate his office at Vanguard Hospital. He resisted the urge to indulge in nostalgia over each knickknack and personal effect as he stuffed them all into boxes. Some items, such as his assorted family holographs, he had removed to his quarters a few at a time, in anticipation of filing his resignation. Others, such as the various gag gifts his friends or subordinates had given him over the years, he had waited until today to box up.

A familiar, squarish head topped with gray hair and fronted by an ashen mustache leaned in around the corner of the office’s
open doorway. “Excuse me, Zeke,” said Doctor Robles, “I don’t mean to rush you, but—”

“Yes, you do,” Fisher said. He flashed a teasing grin he’d spent a lifetime perfecting. “Hold your horses, Gonzalo. I’ll be out of your hair soon enough.”

Robles scratched absently at his snowy temple. “That’s what you said three days ago.”

“I have a lot of things.” Sensing that the new CMO was about to reach the limits of his patience with the already unconscionable delay in claiming his new office, Fisher held up a hand to forestall any argument. “No more jokes. I’ll just be a few more minutes, I promise.”

Making a V of his index and middle fingers, Robles pointed first at his eyes, then at Fisher, miming the message,
I’m keeping an eye on you
. Then the fiftyish man slipped away, back to the frantic hustle and deadly drudgery of running Vanguard Hospital on an average day.

Fisher tucked a jawless, cast-resin skull that he had used for close to thirty years as a candy dish into his lightweight carbon-fiber box of bric-a-brac. For a moment he considered leaving “Yorick” as an office-warming gift for Robles, but then he decided that inheriting the prime piece of Vanguard Hospital real estate would be reward enough for the soft-spoken internist. Besides, without it, where would Fisher keep his mints?

As he excavated three years of detritus from the bottom drawer of his desk, he heard a knock at the open doorway. Laboring to push himself back up to a standing position, he grouched, “Dammit, Gonzalo, when I said ‘a few minutes,’ I didn’t think you’d take it so literally.” Then he turned and saw not his successor but his former protégé, his professional prodigal son, looking back at him. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Doctor Jabilo M’Benga smiled, adding warmth to his kind face. “I hear I almost missed you.” He stepped inside the office, and Fisher met him halfway. They embraced like brothers, and then Fisher clasped the younger man’s broad shoulders. “Look at you. I hate to admit it, but starship duty agrees with you.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” M’Benga said as they parted. He strolled in slow steps around the nearly empty office. “Hard to imagine this place without you in it.”

Fisher shrugged. “Not
that
hard. I’ve been doing it for months, and it gets easier all the time.” He continued wedging the last of his private effects into the box. “Sometimes you see the storm coming and you just know it’s time to get out. Know what I mean?”

“I suppose.” M’Benga tucked his hands into the pockets of his blue lab coat. “Though I have to wonder: After more than fifty years in Starfleet, do you think you’re still fit for civilian life? I can’t help but picture you getting home and going stir crazy in about a week.”

That made Fisher chortle. “Oh, I don’t think so. Let me find a seat by a baseball diamond, or a soccer pitch, or a tennis court, and I’ll be right as rain. You’ll see.”

M’Benga mirrored Fisher’s smile. “So. No regrets?”

“Honestly? Only one.” Fisher closed the box. The lid locked with a soft magnetic click. “I’d always hoped you’d be the one to succeed me in this office.” He hefted the box with a grunt, set it atop two others that he’d already sealed for the quartermaster’s office to deliver to him later, then clapped his hands clean and stood beside M’Benga. “But I can see now that you’d never have been happy here. Not really. And I’m glad you found your calling on the
Enterprise
.”

“So am I. But I’m glad I got the chance to work here with you first.”

“Come with me,” Fisher said. “I want to tell you something.” Moving with the slow, steady gait of a man blessed with good health but burdened by old age, he led M’Benga out of the office and down a corridor through the administrative level of Vanguard Hospital. The younger man walked at his side, close enough for them to converse in the hushed tones considered appropriate in a medical setting. “Be glad for all the places you get to be, and everyone you meet along the way. It’s human nature to focus on beginnings or endings, and that’s why we often lose
sight of where we are and what we’re doing, in the moment. But the present moment—the ever-present
now
—is all we ever really have. Our past is already lost, gone forever. Our future might never come. And as you get older and time feels like it’s speeding up, you even start to feel the
now
slipping away. And that’s when you realize just how quickly things can end—when you’re busy thinking about what was or what’ll never be.”

M’Benga aimed an amused but admiring sidelong look at Fisher. “All right, Doctor. Let’s put your philosophy to work. What’s your prescription for this moment of
now
?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Fisher draped his arm across M’Benga’s shoulders. “How would you like to watch a few dozen Tellarites try to reinvent the sport of rugby out on Fontana Meadow?”

“That depends. Will there be beer?”

“Of course,” Fisher said, as if M’Benga were a Philistine just for asking. “Just because we’re hundreds of light-years from civilization, that doesn’t mean we live like savages.”

The younger man laughed. “Okay, count me in.”

They reached the turbolift, Fisher pushed the call button, and they waited for a lift to arrive. “Let me test your memory, Doctor. What’s the first and only rule of rugby?”

M’Benga put on a thoughtful intensity, and Fisher imagined it was because the young physician was recalling one of the many afternoons they’d spent watching sports together on the meadow years earlier. Then M’Benga smiled and looked at him. “No autopsy, no foul.”

“Good man,” Fisher said, patting him on the back. “First round’s on me.”

A pale dot on the
Sagittarius
’s main viewscreen, Eremar looked like nothing special to Captain Nassir’s naked eye. Bereft of planets, it was a dim and tiny ember, a lonely spark in the barren emptiness of the cosmos. The
Sagittarius
was half a billion kilometers from the pulsar, which, without the benefit of a false-spectrum sensor overlay, looked to Nassir like any other star. He knew better, of course. Incredibly dense, it was a neutron star rotating at a phenomenal rate, and its intense electromagnetic field emitted invisible bursts of extremely powerful and potentially dangerous radiation from its magnetic poles at regular intervals of 1.438 seconds.

Commander Terrell stood beside Nassir’s chair, arms folded, looming over the captain, who hunched forward and did his best imitation of Rodin’s iconic sculpture,
The Thinker
. Around them the bridge officers worked quietly, each one keeping a close watch for any sign of danger. At the helm, zh’Firro guided the
Sagittarius
into a standard orbital approach and recon pattern. Sorak monitored the communications panel, Dastin fidgeted nervously as he leaned against the weapons console, and Theriault had her face pressed to the hood over the primary sensor display. The ship hummed along, the deck under Nassir’s feet alive with a steady vibration from the impulse engines pushed to full output.

Nassir had no idea what he and his crew were supposed to be looking for. The pulsar had no planets. Were they seeking a derelict spacecraft? An abandoned space station? What if the Orions had simply used this isolated, hazardous place as a rendezvous point? He pushed that last pessimistic speculation from his mind. The
Omari-Ekon
’s navigational logs had not indicated any contact with other vessels in proximity to Eremar. They had, however,
indicated a number of peculiar maneuvers, and unless a more promising lead presented itself soon, Nassir’s orders were to copy the Orions’ flight path and see where it led.

Theriault dispelled the leaden hush with a brief exclamation of surprise and elation, transforming herself into the focus of attention on the bridge. She looked up from the sensor hood, her youthful face bright with excitement. “I found something! Something really
weird
!” Before either Nassir or Terrell had the chance to ask her to elaborate, she punched commands into her console and routed her findings to the main screen. A computer model of Eremar was superimposed over the image of the star, and several seemingly random points in close orbit of the pulsar were highlighted. “There’s a network of artificial objects around the pulsar, including one directly in the path of its emission axis.”

Everyone fixed intense stares on the viewscreen, and Nassir rose from his chair. “What in the name of Kasor is
that
?”

Trembling with barely contained glee, Theriault said, “I have a hypothesis.”

Terrell shot a curious stare her way. “Let’s hear it.”

“I think these objects used to be part of a Dyson bubble,” Theriault said. “They’re all composed of ultralight carbon compounds the sensors don’t recognize.” More commands tapped into the science console conjured a web of arcing lines connecting the far-flung dots to the one at the top. “Based on their positions, I think there used to be a lot more of them, hundreds of thousands, all around this pulsar. Now there are maybe a few hundred left.”

Sorak arched one gray brow. “Most remarkable.”

Getting up from the tactical panel, Dastin asked, “What do those lines represent?”

“Subspace distortions,” Theriault replied. “Tiny tunnels through space-time.”

Nassir began to imagine what this construct must have looked like when it was whole. “Could those subspace tunnels have been transmission conduits for energy and data?”

The perky science officer nodded. “Absolutely.”

Zh’Firro leaned forward until she’d practically draped herself over the helm. “Are they orbiting the pulsar?”

“No,” Theriault said. “They’re statites, not satellites.” She thumbed a switch on her panel and enlarged the sensor image of one of the nearest objects. It resembled a massive disk surrounded by enormous, diaphanous fins. “They maintain their positions by using light sails and radiation pressure to counteract the pulsar’s gravity.”

Terrell’s brow wrinkled with confusion. “But what about the one that lies on the pulsar’s emission axis? How does it hold its position when it gets zapped?”

Theriault shrugged. “No idea.”

“I think we’re about to find out,” zh’Firro said. She looked back at Nassir. “If we follow the
Omari-Ekon
’s flight plan, we’ll have to make a roughly half-second warp jump into that statite’s shadow. It’s the only way to get there without being fried by a blast from the pulsar.”

Shrinking back into his seat, Dastin muttered, “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Neither do I,” Nassir said, “but she’s right. If that’s the end point of the Orions’ trip to Eremar, there’s a good chance that’s where they found the artifact.”

That news didn’t seem to sit well with Terrell. “Is it safe for us to go there?”

Theriault’s sunny disposition gave way to trepidation. “Mostly.”

Sorak stepped forward, toward Nassir and Terrell. “To elaborate on Lieutenant Theriault’s response, the statite would shield us from the majority of the pulsar’s immediately damaging emissions—but not all of them. Even in its shadow, we’d still be subjected to dangerous levels of cosmic radiation and electromagnetic effects. Inside the ship, with shields raised, we would have little to worry about. But anyone venturing outside would need to limit their exposure to no more than four hours at a time. They would also require antiradiation therapy upon their return to the ship.”

Dastin shot a dubious look at the Vulcan. “Isn’t that a decision for the doctor?”

“I am a medical doctor,” Sorak said.

Terrell quipped to the new tactical officer, “He also holds doctorates in archaeology and xenobotany. So, if you get the urge to debate him about fossils or flowers . . . don’t.” The gentle rebuke was enough to persuade Dastin to turn his attention back to his own console. Turning back, Terrell asked Sorak, “How long will it take to prep a landing party?”

“Twenty minutes,” Sorak said. “However, there is one further complication.”

Anticipating the Vulcan’s news, Nassir said, “No transporters.”

“Correct, sir.” To the others he explained, “Despite the protection offered by the statite, inside the pulsar’s emission axis the transporter will be inoperable. We’ll need to land the ship and deploy either on foot or in the rovers, depending upon the local gravity and terrain.”

Nassir returned to his chair and sat down, feeling as if a black hole had taken hold of his spirit. He recalled the hyperbolic slogan of a Starfleet recruitment poster he’d seen as a youth on Delta IV: “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.”